Sassinak (36 page)

"Speaking of that," said Hollister. "I presume we're screened. . . ?" Sass pressed the controls and nodded. "I hadn't had a chance to tell you, and since the crisis appeared to be over—" He pulled a small gray box from his pocket and laid it on the table. "I found
this
in the number two power center just as we landed. Disabled it, of course, but I think it was intended to interfere with the tractor controls."

Sass picked up the featureless box and turned it over in her hands. "Induction control?"

"Right. It could be used for all sorts of things, including setting off weapons—"

"Where, precisely, did you find it?"

"Next to a box of circuit breakers, where it looked like it might be part of that assembly—some boxes have another switchbox wired in next to them. Same shade of gray, same type of coating. But I've been looking every day for anything new, anything different—that's how I spotted it. At first I wasn't even sure, but when I touched it, it came off clean—no wires. Nela cracked it and read the chips for me; that's how I know it was intended to mess up the tractor beam."

"Dupaynil?" She looked down the table at him. His expression was neutral.

"I'd wish to have seen it in place, yet clearly it had to be disabled in that situation, with the possibility of hostile fire. Did you consider physical traces?"

Hollister nodded. "Of course. I held it with gloves, and Nela dusted it, but we didn't find any prints. Med or you, sir, might find other traces."

"The point is," said Sassinak, "that we've finally found physical evidence of our saboteur. Still aboard, since I'm sure Hollister can say that wasn't in place yesterday, and still active."

"If we find a suspect," Dupaynil said, "we might look inside this for traces of the person who programmed it."

"If we find a suspect," said Sassinak. "And we'd better." On that note, the meeting adjourned.

Sassinak had made extensive preparations for her meeting the next morning with Captain Cruss. Unless he had illegal Fleet-manufactured detectors, he could not know that a full audio-video hook up linked her office to Ford's quarters and the bridge. Currald had furnished his most impressive heavyworld marines for an escort through the ship, although Sassinak had chosen Weft guards for her personal safety. She wanted to see if Cruss would overreach himself.

When Currald signalled that Cruss was on his way, she watched on the monitor. The five men and women that sauntered across the grid between ships were unpleasant-looking, even for heavyworlders. They had not bothered to put on clean uniforms, Sassinak noticed; even Cruss looked rumpled and smudged. She glanced briefly at her white upholstered chairs, and muttered a brief curse to rudeness . . . no doubt they would do their best to soil her things, and smirk to themselves about it. She knew too many fastidious heavyworlders to believe that they were innately dirty.

By the time they reached Main Deck, Sassinak had heard comments from observers she'd stationed along their path. They had argued about leaving their hand weapons with the guards; Captain Cruss carried a small, roughly globular object which he insisted he must hand-carry to Sassinak himself. She signalled an assent. They had made snide remarks to Currald and the heavyworlder escort, and pointedly turned away from the Wefts. They had lounged insolently on the grabbar in the cargo lift, and commented on the grooming of ship's crew in terms that had the reporting ensign red-faced. And of course they were late . . . a studied discourtesy which Sassinak met with her own. When Gelory ushered them in with cool precision, Sassinak glanced up from a desk covered with datacards.

"Oh! Dear me, I lost track of time." She could see, behind the heavyworlders, Currald's flick of a grin: she
never
lost track of time. But she went on, smoothly and sweetly. "I'm so sorry, Captain Cruss—if you'll just take a seat—anywhere will do—and give me a moment to clear this." She turned back to her work, quickly organizing the apparent disarray, and tapping the screen before her with a control wand. Arly, by prearrangement, appeared in the doorway with a hardcopy file, and apologized profusely for interrupting.

"It's all right, Commander," said Sass. Arly's eyes widened at this sudden promotion in rank, but she had the good sense to ride with it. "Are those the current status reports? Good—if you'll relay these to Com, and tell them to use the Blue codebook—and then ask the Chief Engineer to clear these variations, that will be all." She handed Arly a stack of datacards and the hardcopy that had just spit from her console. With a quick glance at the file Arly had handed her, she thumbed a control that opened a desk drawer, deposited it therein, and returned her attention to Cruss and his crew. "There, now. We've had so much message traffic, it's taken me this long to sort things out. Captain, I've spoken to you—and this is your crew—?"

Cruss introduced his crew with none of the overused, but filthy, epithets of the day before. They glowered, uniformly, and stank of more than Ireta. Sassinak wondered if their ship were really that short of sanitary facilities, or if they preferred to smell bad.

"May I see your ship's papers—" It was not really a request, not with the
Zaid-Dayan
's weaponry trained on the transport, and her marines on board. Cruss took a crumpled, stained folder out of the chest pocket of his shipsuit, and tossed it across the room. One of the marines turned to glare at him, and then glanced to Sassinak for guidance, but she did not react, merely picking up the distasteful object and opening it to read. "I'll also need your personal identification papers," she said. "Crew ratings—union memberships—if you'll hand those to Gelory—" They knew Gelory was a Weft; she could tell by the subtle withdrawal, as if they were afraid a Weft could harm them by skin touch. Sassinak went on reading.

According to the much-smudged (and probably faked) papers, transport and crew were on lease to Newholme, one of the shabbier commercial companies licensed by the Federation Colonial Service to set up colonies. Stamps from a dozen systems blotched the pages. Entry and exit from Sorrell-III, entry and exit from Bay Hill, entry and exit from Cabachon, Drissa, Zaduc, Porss . . . and Diplo. Destination a heavyworld colony two systems away, which Sassinak thought she recalled had reached its startup quota.

With hardly a sound, Gelory deposited the crew's individual papers on Sass's desk, murmuring "Captain," and drifting back to her place. Sassinak made no comment, and turned to these next, ignoring the squeaks and grunts of her furniture as the heavyworlders shifted in bored insolence, as well as their sighs and muttered curses. With the heavyworlders safely installed in her office, Ford should soon have Varian and Kai—the co-leader she hadn't met—in his quarters nearby, where they could see the interview without being seen. Until then, she intended to pore over these papers as if they were rare gems.

Luckily they were about as she'd expected, justifying a long examination. Captain Cruss, it turned out, had no master's license—just a temporary permit from Diplo. He had been a master mate (and what kind of rank was
that
, Sassinak wondered . . . she'd not seen that before) on an ore-hauler for eight years, and second mate on an asteroid-mining shuttle before that. Newholme had granted a temporary waiver of its usual requirements on the basis of Diplo's permit—that looked like a bribe.

First-mate, senior pilot Zansa, on the other hand, had had a master's license and once worked for Cobai Chemicals—which implied that her master's license had been legitimate. But it was stamped "rescinded" in the odd orange ink that nothing could eradicate completely—and with a notation that Zansa had become addicted to bellefleur, a particularly dangerous drug for a ship captain. Sassinak looked up and found Zansa, who bore the characteristic facial scars of a bellefleur addict, though they were all pale and dry.

"I'm clean," the woman growled. "Been clean five years, and next year I can retake the exams—"

"Shut
up
," said Cruss, savagely, and Zansa shrugged, clearly not intimidated. Sassinak went back to the papers. So . . . Zansa was the expert, and Cruss the cover—though she wondered why they hadn't found a legitimate master. Surely they could have done better than a recovering bellefleur addict.

Second pilot Hargit had had a checkered career, with rescinded visa stamps all over his records: charges and some convictions for petty theft, assault and battery, and "disturbance." That was from Charade, which usually had a pretty tolerant attitude towards disturbances. For the past five years, he'd piloted a cargo hauler between two heavyworlder planets, apparently without incident.

Lifesystems engineer Po was the largest of the five, a gross mass of flesh that escaped his shipsuit where the fastenings had strained from the cloth. He had a toothy grin that made Sassinak want to reach for a stunner—the kind of grin she remembered too well from her days as a slave. He had also been cashiered from the Diplo insystem space militia. She wondered how many of the hopeful colonists in coldsleep on the transport would have a chance to wake up with this . . . person . . . watching over their safety. He'd given up the fight to maintain traditional heavyworlder fitness on shipboard, but Sassinak did not doubt his strength.

And last was the "helper," Roella. Her papers listed a variety of occupations, in space and on planet, including "entertainer"—which, for someone of her appearance, meant only one thing. She'd also been jailed twice, for "disrespect"—but that was on Courance, where unlike Charade they were very picky indeed.

Plenty of questions to ask, but nothing she wanted to pursue too far, not now. A light came up on her console; she ignored it, and went on reading, rolling the control wand in her fingers. If they were clever, these heavyworlders, they would realize what it was—a stun-wand, as well as a link to her computers, With their backgrounds, they'd all had intimate experience with a stun-wand, somewhere. She finished turning through Roella's ID packet, and sighed, as if deeply pained by all this. Then she looked up at the tense, angry faces across from her.

"Yes, yes, Captain Cruss," she said, pouring all the smoothness she could into her voice. "Your papers do seem to be in order, and one cannot fault your chivalry in diverting to investigate a distress call . . ." What distress call? For they'd have had to receive it many light years away, the way they'd come. Of course they didn't know they'd been followed.

But Cruss was explaining, or trying to, that it had not been a normal distress call. Sassinak pushed her own thoughts aside to listen. A homing capsule, intended for the EEC compound ship which had dropped both the Ryxi colony and the exploration team. It had gone astray, somehow been damaged, and been found just beyond the orbit of the outermost planet of this system.

Not bloody likely, Sassinak thought grimly . . . it would be like someone in an aircraft happening to notice a single small bead on the end of the runway as they landed. Nothing that size could be detected in FTL flight, and it was more than a little unlikely that they'd come out of FTL on top of it by accident. She was surprised when Cruss stood up, and deposited the battered hunk of metal on her desk with insolent precision. So—that was his surprise—and he
had
a homing capsule, or part of it. Stripped of its propulsion unit and power pack, it was hardly recognizable. She refrained from touching it, noting only that engraved ID numbers were just visible along one pitted side.

She was not convinced of his story, even when he generously offered to let her extract the capsule's message from his computer, but she had no intention of arguing with him at this point. She doubted he knew that the Fleet computers had their own way with such capsules—and could extract more than a faked message implanted therein. But all that would come out at the trial. Now she smiled, graciously, and explained her reasons for confining them all to their ship, but with permission to trade for fresh foodstuffs with the locals. Cruss surged to his feet with another stale curse, and his companions followed. Sassinak sat quietly, relaxed: behind them the two Wefts had shifted to their own form, and clung to the angle of bulkhead and overhead. The marine escort was poised, hands hovering over weapons.

"I hope your water supplies are adequate," she said in the same conversational tone. "The local water is foul-tasting and smells." Cruss actually growled, a rumble of furious denial that he needed
anything
from her or anyone else. "Very well, then," she went on. "I'm positive you'll wish to continue on your way as soon as we have received clearance for you. The indigenes will have all the help we can give them. You may be sure of that." She stood, tapping the wand against her left palm, to watch them leave. Cruss made a motion toward the capsule, but Sassinak lowered the wand to forestall him.

"I think that had better remain," she said calmly. "Sector will wish to examine it—" His eyes shifted angrily. Guilty, she thought. What had they done to that thing? And where had it been sent? Surely not all the way to Diplo—at the sublight speed a capsule traveled, that would take years. His muscles bunched; Sassinak flicked a finger signal and the Wefts reassembled themselves beside him. He flinched, his expression shifting from barely controlled fury and contempt to alarm.

"Good day, Captain," she said easily, despite a mouth suddenly dry as the crisis passed. Of the others, only Zansa looked longingly toward the pile of personal documents on her desk—Sassinak avoided her eyes until she'd turned to leave.

As soon as the door slid shut, Sassinak relaxed back into her chair and turned it to face the video pickup. Ford quickly hooked their video into her screen, so that she could see them. Varian looked much better today: a vividly alive young woman who reminded Sassinak of herself, with those thick dark curls. But Varian's eyes were a clear gray, today untinged by the pain or stress that had clouded them the day before. Kai, on the other hand, looked nothing like an expedition leader. Slumped in his seat, pale, a padded suit protecting vulnerable skin . . . and his voice, when he spoke, revealed the strain even this much activity placed on him. He seemed harried, nervous—in a way more normal than Varian, for someone who'd been through a mutiny and forty-three years of coldsleep. Plus whatever had attacked him. She chatted with them, trying to assess Kai's condition and Varian's wits. Neither of them had any idea what the Thek presence meant, although Kai told her about the existing cores, found before the mutiny. She was still digesting that when Kai turned formal, and asked if she considered her presence to be the relief of the expeditionary team.